Welcome to 'This is My Architecture.'
I am Hawn, and today we are joined by Ben from Northwestern Mutual.
Hello. Hi, Hawn.
Before we get into your architecture, can you tell me a little bit about Northwestern Mutual?
Yeah, Northwestern Mutual is an insurance and financial services company.
Okay. And with that, what is the use case that you're trying to solve today?
Sure, so the use case that we're trying to solve is building a serverless pipeline
to allow developers to get their architectures out to AWS safely and securely.
So let's just say I'm a developer, can you walk me through the flow of how that works?
Sure, so you're a developer.
The first thing that you're going to do is go to the CDK.
This is the AWS CDK.
We've actually built our own MWM CDK, we call it.
Okay.
In the MWM CDK, we have extended a lot of the AWS CDK's constructs
to make it easier for developers to get their architecture safely out to AWS
like adding encryption or adding logging and monitoring in there.
So once they go to the MWM CDK and decide on their architecture,
they commit to their Git repo, and that kicks off a build.
Okay, so what does that build do?
So that build runs through a GitLab CI pipeline and that pipeline does a few things.
First, it's going to create a change set to tell you what's going to change in your architecture
when it does get deployed.
The next thing we do is a whole bunch of validation.
So we validate that your code is secure, that your infrastructure is secure,
that you're allowed to deploy to the AWS account that you're trying to deploy to.
And, finally, once that's all done, we do the CDK deploy
and it actually gets your architecture out to AWS.
Okay, so what happens during that deploy?
I notice you have this box here that's templatized
So what does that do? Yep.
So this is a template that we've built.
We just call it our API-driven pattern.
And it's a really basic API pattern that you've got API Gateway.
API Gateway calls a Lambda.
That Lambda calls a DynamoDB
which returns information to the user, whatever they're looking for.
And we built this pattern because we talked to our developers,
and this was a very simple pattern that we knew could be reused over and over again.
Okay, so what are some of the baseline benefits do they get from leveraging your CDK?
Yeah, so the great thing about it
is that we've built in all of these wonderful things into our CDK.
We've built in monitoring, we've built in logging.
So, in general, you have an SNS topic,
and let's say that there is a problem with your Lambda, your Lambda has an error,
so it sends that error to CloudWatch.
CloudWatch sends an alert to SNS.
And SNS then sends an alert to an email or a Slack hook,
whatever you've put in there.
The other thing that we have is, with CloudWatch Logs,
we've got a CloudWatch Logs subscription
that a Kinesis data stream picks up and actually feeds our ELK instance
so that developers can go there and see their logs
just like any other logs that they have for all their other applications.
Awesome. So what are some of the benefits that you've seen from this architecture?
Yeah, so we've seen developers able to get these architectures out in under a day.
So, really, what they can do is, once this architecture is out there,
they can really just focus on their business logic.
They don't have to worry about their infrastructure and architecture,
which is really great because that's what we have developers to do,
we have them write business logic, which is awesome.
Awesome. So what's next for Northwestern Mutual?
Yeah, so we're going to continue to develop this pipeline,
but especially the pattern.
So the next pattern that we're working on is a cloud front static site
to make it really easy and safe for developers to get that site out to AWS
for our clients to consume.
That is amazing. Thank you so much for going over your architecture.
That is awesome how you're able to streamline the CI/CD pipeline
to reduce the cycle time,
and help the application team just focus on the product innovation
to help the application delivery in a quick-to-market fashion.
So thank you. Thanks.
And thank you for watching 'This is My Architecture'.